Here, at least, he thought he knew what the trouble was. When King Lanius looked out into the Maze and then glowered at him yet again, he decided to strike first, before things got even worse. “Are you looking for your mother’s convent?” he asked.
Lanius started. Grus hid a smile. Lanius hadn’t thought he was so obvious. Grus didn’t think he had. After a moment, the young king nodded. “Yes, I am,” he said with as much defiance as he could muster.
“It’s over that way, I believe,” Grus told him, pointing southeast. “I’m sorry she’s there. You can believe that or not, just as you please, but it happens to be true. If she hadn’t tried to kill me, she’d still be in the city of Avornis. I’d like to hope you believe that’s true.”
He waited. Lanius said nothing for a long, long time. At last, though, he nodded. “I suppose it may be. But it doesn’t make things any easier for me.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not true. It doesn’t make things much easier for me.”
“All right, Your Majesty,” Grus replied. “I don’t ask that you love me, even if one of the other things I hope is that you’ll come to love my daughter one of these days. But I do wish you’d try to be fair to me.”
He waited again. Lanius looked like a man doing his best to hate him. After another pause, the youth said, “I suppose even the Banished One deserves that much. I’ll give it to you, if I can.”
“Thank you so much.” Grus didn’t try to hide the sarcasm. Lanius turned red. Grus went on, “The gods gave the Banished One what they thought he deserved. Now they’re rid of him, and they don’t have to worry about him anymore. We still do. Kings of Avornis have tried to be fair to him, or what they reckoned fair to him, before. You’d know more about that than I do, wouldn’t you?”
“Probably.” Lanius didn’t notice how arrogant he sounded.
“Fine,” Grus said. Odds were Lanius did know much more about it. But Grus knew what counted. “It’s never worked, has it? The only thing the Banished One calls fair is everything for him and nothing for us—not even all of our souls. Am I right about that, or am I wrong?”
“Oh, you’re right.” Lanius was willing—more than willing, even eager—to talk seriously about something abstract and intellectual. He went on, “The best explanation for it that I’ve read is that he reckons the gods his equals, and might deal fairly with them if they would deal with him at all. But we’re only people. He doesn’t see much more point to fair dealings with us than we would to fair dealings with so many sheep.”
He wasn’t stupid. He was, in fact, anything but stupid. “That’s interesting—makes a lot of sense, too, I think.” Grus sighed. “But it doesn’t make dealing with the Banished One any easier.”
“No,” Lanius agreed. “I don’t think anything will ever make dealing with the Banished One much easier. Even if we could get the Scepter of Mercy back, that wouldn’t make him want to deal with us. It would just make him worry about us more.”
“The way we’d worry about a sheep that could shoot a bow,” Grus suggested. Lanius nodded. Then he snickered. He didn’t laugh very often, and Grus felt a prick of pleasure at teasing mirth out of him.
Then he felt a prick of a different sort, and another, and another. The marshes and puddles and swamps and tussocks of the Maze bred mosquitoes and flies and midges and gnats in swarming, buzzing profusion. Lanius was slapping and muttering, too. On a nearby barge, horses’ tails switched back and forth, back and forth. The animals’ ears twitched. On yet another barge, a sailor fell into the water because he kept on swatting bugs without noticing he was walking off the stern. The air smelled wet and stagnant.
Here and there in the Maze, willows and elms and swamp oaks and other water-loving trees created little forests amidst the grasses and bushes and reeds and cattails and water lilies that covered most of the region. Kingfishers shrieked. Dippers chirped. Sun-dappled shadows danced. The trees marked higher ground—not high ground, for there was none hereabouts, but higher, and drier. People lived on that higher ground, those who made their living from what the Maze gave them and those who got sent there for what they’d done in the wider world.
Grus knew just where Queen Certhia’s convent lay. He said not a word as the barge passed within half a mile of it. Instead, he listened to the chirping frogs, pointed out a swimming water snake to Lanius, laughed when half a dozen turtles leaped off a floating log into the stream, and thought about fair dealing with the Banished One. “Baaa!” he said softly. I may be a sheep to him. One day, I’d like to be a sheep with a bow.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The last time Lanius had been so far from home was on Lepturus’ campaign against the Thervings. He’d still been a boy then. He’d told himself then that he never wanted to become a general. Moving against Corvus and Corax did nothing to change his mind. In fact, that they were no less Avornan than he only made the fight harder to bear.
He kept an eye on Grus. If the former commodore worried about fighting his countrymen, he didn’t let it show. He went after the two rebel counts as ferociously as he might have attacked the Menteshe if they’d irrupted into Avornis.
Seeing that finally made Lanius remark on it. Grus gave him a long, slow, thoughtful look and said, “Your Majesty, if you think I like righting a civil war, you’re wrong. But there’s only one thing worse than fighting a civil war—fighting it and losing it.”
That gave Lanius something to look thoughtful about. Having thought, he found he couldn’t criticize Grus on the grounds of how hard he fought. I’ll have to look for something else, went through his mind. When his fellow king at last led them from the Maze—where no one could move fast even if he wanted to—they swarmed south, toward Corvus’ crag-mounted castle. “Do you plan to get there before Corvus knows you’re coming?” Lanius asked him.
“Too much to hope for, even though it’d be very nice,” Grus answered. “Getting between his army and his castle would be all right, though.”
“How do you propose to manage that?” Lanius inquired. As he put the question to Grus, their horses trampled swaths through a field of ripening barley. Corvus’ men wouldn’t harvest it this year. Neither would any other Avornans.
“Well, Your Majesty, you may have noticed that I didn’t bring my whole strength through the Maze,” Grus said mildly.
As a matter of fact, Lanius hadn’t noticed that. How could he have, when Grus’ army was split up among so many barges? But he nodded wisely, as though he had. “Yes, of course,” he said, even if it wasn’t of course at all. And then, because Grus seemed to expect something more, he asked, “Where’s the rest of it?”
By the way Grus beamed, that was the right question. “Very good, Your Majesty,” Grus said. “That’s what you need to know, sure enough. The rest of it’s with Hirundo. He marched out on dry land, just as openly as you please. Corvus and Corax didn’t have any doubts at all that he was coming.”
“No, eh?” Lanius said, and Grus solemnly shook his head. He waited to see what Lanius would make of that. Lanius didn’t need long. “Then the rebels went forth to fight Hirundo!” he exclaimed. “No wonder no one’s come out to try to stop us!”
“No wonder at all, and I hope so,” Grus answered. “Hard to pay attention to the Maze, anyhow. Nobody ever expects anything to come out of it. And if you happen to be looking the other way when something does—well, too bad for you.”